LITERARY WORK IN LONDON. 213 



work in his garden, did not improve matters. In the 

 record of his career at this time, his religious life must not 

 be omitted. After his return from Jamaica in 1846, he 

 was for some time connected with no body of Christians, 

 but in April of the following year he joined a few other 

 persons, almost all of them educated men, in forming at 

 Hackney a meeting of the communion then recently 

 united, throughout England, under the title of " Brethren," 

 or " Plymouth Brethren," as they were usually called, 

 apparently from the circumstance that their central meet- 

 ing was at Bristol, which, like Plymouth (where for some 

 time they did not exist), is in the west of England. The 

 tenets of this body are perhaps well known. They may be 

 best described by a series of negations. The Brethren 

 have no ritual, no appointed minister, no government, no 

 hierarchy of any kind ; they eschew all that is systematic 

 or vertebrate ; their manner of worship is the most 

 socialistic hitherto invented. Their positive tenets are an 

 implicit following of the text of Holy Scripture, the 

 enforcement of adult baptism, subsequent upon conversion 

 and preliminary to the partaking of the Lord's Supper in 

 both kinds, the loaf of bread and the cup of wine being 

 passed from hand to hand in silence, every Sunday 

 morning. 



Whether this interesting sect still exists in anything 

 like its early simplicity I cannot say, but I think not. It 

 is at all events certain that it very soon suffered from a 

 violent split in its own corporation, if such a word may be 

 used of a conglomeration of atoms, and that its obscure 

 meetings became a byword for bigotry and unlovely 

 prejudice. But in its beginning, and when Philip Gosse 

 and his friends first gathered round a deal table in a bare 

 room in Hackney, this Utopian dream of a Christian 

 socialism, with all its simplicity, naivety and earnest faith, 



